6 Unique Notion Mail Features You Need to Know
In A World Without Email, Cal Newport makes the argument that systems are superior to constant communication via email or similar instant messaging tools. As Newport often specifies in his podcast episodes and books, it is not email per se that's the issue in knowledge work. Rather, it is our overuse of email as a way to feel productive and in motion, attending to other people's requests at all times, even if at the expense of our own priorities and interests.
The truth is that meaningful, important work takes time and focused attention, which is not really fostered by the instant communication environment of emails and other messaging tools. Real productivity is measured by the impact of your work, which can be identified based on the key metrics that determine the success of your job. For the vast majority of knowledge work jobs, the metric of success is not dependent on how many emails you reply to in a day or how long you're online and available to the requests of other people.
You may feel tempted to think otherwise, because always being available to others is an evolutionary tactic for survival — if you go too long without attending to others' requests, they won't include you in the group anymore, and you remain isolated and vulnerable, lacking access to resources and human connections.
Yet, knowledge work is many levels of abstraction away from evolutionary survival. It is a novel paradigm, and it requires a restructuring of our conceptualization of it, moving away from the limbic brain and into the prefrontal cortex (more rational, non-impulsive).
One of the antidotes to the hyperactive hive mind — the constant stream of unstructured communication happening via email or similar messaging tools — is to think in systems and systematize as many procedures as you can so that they follow specific workflows and everyone knows what to expect from them. This adds intentionality to your work and a sense of relaxation among everyone involved because expectations and incentives become clear and aligned. In the absence of clear expectations and incentives, everyone defaults to hyperactive hive mind behavior as a signal of motion.
These concepts are philosophical in nature, and you may wonder how they apply to real life when you often feel constrained by other people's requests and the fear of losing your job if you don't remain responsive or signal that you are in some way. It is true that the environment you are in can impact your situation, both positively and negatively. At the same time, change starts within you because you can control your choices. You put your house in order first before expanding to more distal circles.
All this introduction to posit that, fundamentally, there is no specific tool that can resolve your existential dread around work and life (if it exists at all) besides your own mindset and systems thinking first and foremost. Once those are established, you may look into possible tools that can enhance your capacity to consistently execute with success using your systems.
Notion Mail can be one of those tools because it integrates your emails with Notion (where you can build systems) and provides modular, customizable features that enable a more intentional use of emails. Below are six new and noteworthy Notion Mail features that follow this line of reasoning.
6 Unique Notion Mail Features
Auto label and create views ⇒ If you have a Notion AI subscription, you can use Notion AI in Notion Mail. One of the available Notion AI features in Notion Mail is autolabeling. This feature instructs AI to assign labels to incoming emails in your inbox. There is a dedicated button at the top right corner of Notion Mail to set this up.
When you click on it, you will use natural language to describe the type of email you want to label. For example, "emails directly addressed to me by another person instead of mass emails/newsletters."
Notion AI will then identify past emails that fit the description. You can review those examples and approve/decline them so that Notion AI understands the necessary patterns to label that type of email.
Finally, you can name the label, and if you want to see all your labeled emails in one place, you can create a dedicated view on the left sidebar. Views are filtered by specific labels/status/other properties (see next feature).
Add properties ⇒ Similar to a Notion database, you can add properties to emails in Notion Mail. Properties are attributes for your emails. You may add a Status property to track the status of each email or a Priority property to assign priorities. You can use properties to sort, group, or filter different views of your Notion Mail instance. This becomes useful for speeding up your inbox processing workflow or using your own intuitive system to manage emails in a way that makes sense and is effective.
Mention pages from Notion ⇒ Your Notion Mail and Notion workspace are integrated in some capacity. When typing an email, you can @ mention any Notion page in your workspaces (any workspaces you are part of). When you mention a page, it creates a link that recipients can open to access the Notion page—only if they have proper access permissions in Notion (check the page permissions first!)
Draft responses with Notion AI using your workspace knowledge ⇒ When you write an email in Notion Mail, you can use Notion AI to draft responses. You can also set Notion AI to draft responses automatically for every email received (there is a setting for this in Notion Mail). You can use your Notion workspace knowledge as part of the Notion AI prompt by mentioning pages. This allows you to calibrate the AI-drafted responses to follow your preferences/brand guidelines/writing style, or anything else you wish to incorporate in your writing style.
Provide scheduling availability directly from the email editor ⇒ By using the
/schedulecommand when drafting a reply in Notion Mail, the other party can select a day and time to meet with you. You can define the available time slots and the meeting duration, all without leaving the email editor.This is a valuable feature to reduce the back-and-forth conversations that sometimes happen to schedule a meeting with one or multiple other people. For simple scheduling that doesn’t require round robins, tracking analytics, scheduling timezone changes in advance, and other advanced features, the
/schedulecommand can replace Calendly/Cal.com, or similar scheduling tools without issues.Format emails using the Notion editor (slash command) ⇒ Scheduling is only one of the available commands in the Notion Mail editor. You can also use other slash commands for formatting your emails in Notion style (callouts, quotes, headings, and more).
Notion Mail is just one tool that can enhance your workflows and improve how you work. The principles and mindsets you employ are more meaningful and lasting than any tool, since tools merely help you implement and test these principles to become more effective and efficient.
